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Disability Rates: Do they Mean Anything?

Posted by kmancer on July 2nd, 2010

Understanding disability rates and how they affect housing market behavior, in particular moves to supportive housing or assisted living, is a very difficult thing to do. Statistics Canada tells us that 43% of the 65+ population in Canada have some degree of disability, primarily mobility, agility, pain, or hearing. Of those with disabilities, 60% are mildly or moderately disabled, while 40% have severe or very severe disabilities.  What “mild”, “moderate”, and “severe” mean is not easy to define. Statistics Canada uses a complicated rating system to categorize disabilities. At any rate, the question is how these disability rates affect housing market behavior.

To establish a context for his discussion, it’s useful to reflect on the fact that the huge majority of houses in Canada are neither “visitable” nor “accessible”, meaning they do not accommodate aging in place. So does this mean that when people become disabled in some way will they move to supportive housing? Maybe not all people, or even a majority of people, but some quantifiable proportion? Alas, no. We know that entrance into service-enriched housing such as supportive housing or assisted living is primarily need-driven, which means that people move into these types of environments not because they want to but because they have to. However that does not necessarily imply the presence of a disability—people may move because their spouse died and they are afraid to stay alone, or because they are isolated, or not eating properly, or because they have lost their driver’s license. And couples with disabilities are much less likely to move to supportive housing than individuals because they are able to help each other. If there were some way to quantify demand based on disability status we would have to adjust for the number of couples in a market area, which would further complicate an already suspect analysis.

As a result of all these confounding variables, in my view it is not possible to arrive at any conclusions at all about the demand for service-enriched housing in a community by applying national disability rates to the seniors’ population and assuming that some arbitrary proportion of that group will choose to move to service-enriched housing. Some market analysts do this I am sad to report. Be careful if you are working with one.

Tags: Aging, Aging in place, Assisted Living, Disability, Housing Market, Housing Options, Mobility, Senior Housing, Seniors' Housing, Supportive housing, Universal design

This entry was posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Market Studies, Seniors' Housing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.